A small complaint about something I can do nothing about

The thing about not having a local comic shop is that you have to get your comics from somewhere non-local--which is to say, in my case, online.

And the thing about getting your comics online is that you have to pre-order them, I think two months in advance.

What this means is that you can't really make any quick decisions on what you are or are not going to keep getting.

Real-world example: the twelve-year-old is a Hawkgirl fan, due to the cartoon series. I'm looking over the previews a few months back and notice that there's a whole Hawkgirl book! I order it. Of course it won't show up for a couple of months, so I order a couple of more months' worth as well. A few months later Hawkgirl arrives. Holy crap, that is a wretched book! No one here likes it, not even the twelve-year-old who is predisposed to enjoy all things Hawkgirl. But we've still got another two issues coming.

Now, I'm not blaming the system for this. I could almost as easily have preordered one comic, than waited a few months to preorder more (and would be able to back-order the interim issues if it turned out to be worthwhile) if I thought the book was iffy. I, of course, am too impatient to do this, so it's my own damn fault.

No, what I'm complaining about here is that this makes it so hard to cut books! Granted that I was fairly confident that Hawkgirl would continue to suck (and was correct in my assumption). But sometimes you're just not enjoying a book as much as you used to, and you're not feeling good about spending your money on it anymore.

Say, for example, that New Avengers was in the middle of a long, drawn-out, tedious storyline (no! really?) and I decide I have had enough. I don't include it in my next order. Next issue, that story wraps up. Issue after, a new storyline begins, and it's awesome! I reevaluate my decision, and New Avengers is back on my list. Well, excapt that it wasn't on my list for the last several months. Now I have to scramble and order it from the shop when it comes in, which means keeping track of when it comes in. There goes the convenience, right? Maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not.

Note: New Avengers is not on the endangered list, and would have to go a lot further afield before I'd cut it--there's too much nostalgia equity built up there!

The real-world example here, actually, was Legion of Superheroes. I cut it a while back. Then re-added it because I'd heard some good things about the book after they added Supergirl. Right now? Well, I'm looking into cutting some books soon, and it's not on the chopping block but it's sitting in the little cart waiting its turn. It's not a bad book. There's not major suckage ala Hawkgirl (or--ack!--Nightwing, which will be in my comic box again next month thanks to preorders :P) but I'm just not having much fun with it at the moment. Possibly this is a rare case of nostalgia hurting my enjoyment of a current book, when generally it leads me to give a book more leeway than it probably deserves (then again, the Legion has probably been tweaked and revamped and steam-cleaned more than any other book I can think of). We'll see.